Government spending taxes up under Reagan

High unemployment among college graduates? Let’s blame Obama. Radical columnist Susan Stamper Brown follows the usual playbook, requiring gyrations of logic and history to make her point. Most Americans whose savings and investments were irretrievably drained by the hubris and recklessness of our financial institutions, would agree with President Obama that capitalism, as it is currently practiced in this country, is indeed broken. Unfettered capitalism (aided by regulation-hating politicians) has played an enormous role in our country’s economic woes.

Those who want to compare the economic recovery of the 1980s with the recovery from the Great Recession of today need to be reminded that President Ronald Reagan was allowed to dramatically increase spending (even with a large deficit) during that recession, especially on the military. Government employment, services and purchasing also went up under Reagan. And he raised taxes when necessary.

The Tea Party politicians of today have made government spending a scapegoat, ensuring that it has been slashed in spite of a much worse recession, increasing unemployment and putting a further drag on the economy. Republican obstructionism towards any legislation that adds to the deficit ignores plentiful historical evidence that deficit spending in times of economic difficulty allows recovery to move forward.

Those "job creators," you know the ones in the top 1 percent that liberals love to hate? The economy has been positively booming for them. They captured 93 percent of the income gains in the first year of the recovery. And guess what? They haven’t been creating jobs. Young people coming out of college to high unemployment are pretty smart. They know exactly who to blame for our troubled economy. Obama’s 3.5 years in office have been spent repairing the damage caused by the ill-advised policies of the previous administration, and slowly growing our economy once again. It would be disastrous to return our country to the policies of destruction.